刘英杰--阅读材料_My Mother

2022-07-16 09:06:50 文档大全网 [ 字体：小中大 ] [ 阅读： ]

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英杰,材料,Mother,阅读,My
My Mother Amy tan

The most hateful words I have ever said to another human being were to my mother. I was sixteen at the time. They rose from the storm in my chest and I let them fall in a fury of hailstones. “I hate you. I wish I were dead.” I waited for her to collapse, stricken by my cruel words, but she was still standing upright, her chin raised, her lips stretched in a crazy smile. “OK, maybe I die,” she said. “Then I no longer be your mother!”

We had many similar exchanges. Sometimes she actually tried to kill herself, by running into the street, holding a knife to her throat. She, too, had storms in her chest. And what she aimed at me was as fast and deadly as lightning bolts.

For days after our arguments, she would not speak to me. She tormented me, acted as if she had no feelings for me whatsoever. I was lost to her. And, because of that, I lost battle after battle, all of them: the times she criticized me, humiliated me in front of others, forbade me to do this or that without even listening to one good reason that it should be the other way. I swore to myself I would never forget these injustices. I would store them, harden my heart, make myself as impenetrable as she was.

I remember this now, because I am also remembering another time, just a couple of years ago. I was forty-seven, had become a different person by then, had gone on to be a fiction writer, someone who uses memory and imagination. In fact, I was writing a story about a girl and her mother when the phone rang.

It was my mother, and this surprised me. Had someone helped her make the call? For three years, she had been losing her mind to Alzheimer’s disease. Early on, she forgot to lock her door. Then she forgot where she lived. She forgot who people were and what they had meant to her. Lately, she had been unable to remember many of her worries and sorrows.

“Amy,” she said, and she began to speak quickly in Chinese. “Something is wrong with my mind. I think I’m going crazy.”

I caught my breath. Usually she could barely speak more than two words at a time. “Don’t worry,” I started to say.

“It’s true,” she went on. “I feel like I can’t remember many things. I can’t remember what I did yesterday. I can’t remember what happened a long time ago, what I did to you…” She spoke as a person might if she were drowning and had bobbed to the surface with the force of the will to live, only to see how far she had already drifted, how impossibly far she was from the shore. She spoke frantically: “I know I did something to hurt you.” “You didn’t,” I said. “Really, don’t worry.”

“I did terrible things. But now I can’t remember what. And I just want to tell you… I hope you can forget just as I’ve forgotten.”

I tried to laugh, so that she wouldn’t notice the cracks in my voice. “Really, don’t worry.” “OK, I just wanted you to know.”

After we hung up, I cried, both happy and sad. I was again a sixteen-year-old, but the storm in my chest was gone.

My mother died six months later. But she had bequeathed to me her most healing words, those which are as open and eternal as a clear blue sky. Together, we knew in our hearts what we should remember, what we can forget.